The war is over, if you want it Republicans don’t mention this as they’re busy pretending to repeal ObamaCare 37 times, but they’re voting to take health insurance away from millions of working Americans. Medicaid expansion will insure those who earn up to 133% of the poverty level and previously earned too much to qualify for Medicaid — at least […]

When educating your kids is all about making a profit, being a shyster is as good a qualification as anything

Last year, I wrote about fake Democrat Cody Bailey who had his ass handed to him by now-State Representative David Knezek. Bailey barely beat a candidate in the Democratic primary who didn’t even run a campaign and got his clock cleaned by Knezek. As I outlined in my expose, Bailey was anything but a Democrat and ran one of the sleaziest, most fact-challenged campaigns in my experience.

Imagine my (non) surprise to discover this week that Bailey, at the tender age of 22, is now the president of the Taylor Preparatory High School in Taylor, Michigan. What qualifies Bailey to be the president of an educational institution with a lofty mission of being “a bridge to a life well lived” for high schoolers? In a word (well, two words): not much.

Much more on this sordid story after the jump.

Uh, someone didn’t get the memo that the answer to everything is to cut corporate taxes

Flint Emergency Manager Ed Kurtz is leading a push to increase city income taxes by 0.5% for residents and 0.25% for non-residents. That’s a 50% increase. Why? Turns out Flint is out of money and needs revenue. It’s almost as if Flint’s problems weren’t caused by waste, fraud, and mismanagement after all.

More after the jump.

Getchyer tissues ready Marine Sgt. Ross Gundlach of Madison, Wisconsin worked side by side in Afghanistan with Casey, a 4-year old yellow Labrador Retriever, doing explosives detection. To say that the two formed a strong attachment would be an understatement. Gundlach returned to Wisconsin after his tour was complete and Casey went to Iowa to work for the state fire […]

What could possibly go wrong?

On the banks of the Detroit River, giant three-story tall mountains of black rock have been accumulating, quickly and quietly enough to take a lot of Detroiters and neighboring Canadians by surprise. The piles are petroleum coke or “pet coke”, a by-product of the processing of tar sands oil from Canada. A newly upgraded Marathon Petroleum refinery in Detroit now allows them to process the tar sands oil, producing copious amounts of the high-sulfur, high-carbon waste product.

A recent New York Times article shows that Michiganders and Canadians alike are concerned by the use of land directly on the Detroit River to store the potentially hazardous pet coke.

Click through for more.

Sign the petition and make your voice heard. The very first post I wrote for Eclectablog was about Senate Bill 136, the “Religious Liberty and Conscience Protection Act.” This bill would allow healthcare providers, facilities and insurers to refuse to provide or cover “objectionable” healthcare services on religious or moral grounds. As I explained in that post and two that […]

The power of tenacity and coordination

Anne and I like to recharge our mental and spiritual batteries by tossing our kayaks into our beater pick-up truck Steve and heading out to Pickerel Lake in the Pinckney State Recreation Area. It’s actually on a chain of three lakes that includes Crooked Lake.

The wildlife on these lakes is abundant and, especially in kayaks, you can get startling close to the animals.

On Friday night, we whipped up a batch of margaritas and headed out for a sunset booze cruise. While we were paddling, we came across something I’ve never seen before: two Red-Winged Blackbirds systematically attacking and driving off two adult Sandhill Cranes who had strayed too close to their nest.

Video and photos after the jump.

Either we break up the big banks or the big banks break us Attorney General Eric Holder made actual some news this week amid the GOP’s scandal frenzy: he told the House Judiciary committee that big banks are not too big too jail. He was willing to criminally prosecute the nation’s largest banks, though he hasn’t done so since the […]

Good people are fighting every day for Michigan’s students. This organization is among them. Just when you begin to despair over the seemingly endless battles public education is facing in Michigan, you find a reason to feel optimistic. In Pontiac, one of the Michigan school districts that’s struggling the most, an organization called Bound Together is providing an environment where […]

Heartless is as heartless does If you were a lawmaker and were given the chance to reduce the number of uninsured Michiganders by nearly half and save the state nearly a billion dollars over the next ten years, what would you do? If you were a Michigan Senate Republican, you would reject it. That’s what Michigan Senate Republicans did yesterday […]

Ooo-ooo, that smell… Last month, after the Detroit News tore back the curtains on the secretive “skunk works” group, staffed by some of Gov. Snyder’s aides and aimed at destroying our public school system while funneling the proceeds to for-profit charter schools, the group was quickly reconfigured to be one that was more, shall we say, public? The Governor’s staffer […]